Books: Generations the Chief: a Memoir of Fathers and Sons by Lance Morrow

Lance Morrow's earliest memory is of loss: "I look for my father, but cannot move . . . I stand in the middle of an open space, immobile, under a dark gray sky." Some four decades have passed since that bleak moment. Morrow, a TIME senior writer, is himself a parent, but he remains a Daedalus figure, trying to come to terms with the past.

On the surface, and he had an excess of surface, Hugh Morrow would seem the epitome of a family man; he was one of eight children and came to be father and stepfather to ten of...